What might be the knock-on effect in Europe of Donald Trump?s victory? The next big democracy to vote after America is France, which holds its presidential election next spring. Could Marine Le Pen, leader of the populist National Front (FN), be elected president?

Before the American result, the question seemed absurd. Polls have suggested for months that she would do well enough to secure one of the two second-round places at voting next April. This in itself would be a victory of sorts, repeating the achievement of her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, in 2002. But no polls have indicated that she could beat the centre-right candidate likely to face her.

Now, the unthinkable has become conceivable. There was no disguising the delight in Paris at the FN headquarters. A jubilant Ms Le Pen, who had argued that a Trump victory would be good for France, congratulated the American president-elect and praised the ?free? American people. ?It’s not the end of the world,? she declared, ?but the end of a world.? Her lieutenant and party strategist, Florian Philippot, summed up the mood at the FN: ?Their world is collapsing; ours is being built.? Even Mr Le Pen, who has fallen out with his daughter, tweeted: ?Today the United States, tomorrow France!? ?

Certainly, the parallels between Ms Le Pen and Mr Trump are striking. Both trade on simplified truths and build politics on rejection and nostalgia. They have both reinvented themselves as anti-establishment outsiders, who stand up for people forgotten by the system and scorned by the elite. They speak to the same white working-class rage, use similar vocabulary, and thrive each time the establishment sneers at them. Drawing her own personal strength from the old industrial and mining towns of northern France, which once voted Communist, Ms Le Pen is now the favourite politician among French working-class voters.

Their policy instincts are similar too. Mr Trump and Ms Le Pen are both protectionists and nationalists, supportive of Brexit and sympathetic to Russia. The FN has borrowed money from a Russian bank with links to the Kremlin, and Ms Le Pen has long admired Vladimir Putin. Pro-Europeans in Paris are particularly concerned at the prospect of an alliance between Mr Trump, Mr Putin and Ms Le Pen, bent on dividing the European Union and undermining the old order. After the Brexit vote, the FN leader promised a ?Frexit? referendum in France too.

One difference is rhetorical excess. Ms Le Pen is in some ways a Trump lite. She may share many of his reflexes, but wraps them up in more cautious language. She has never, for instance, called for all Muslims to be banned from France, but rather for an end to an ?uncontrolled wave? of immigration. She does not promise to build walls, but to control borders. The problem, she says, is not Islam but what she calls the ?Islamification? of France.

You can’t have Islamification without Islam.

All polls suggest today that Ms Le Pen would similarly face?and lose?a presidential run-off next year against the Republican candidate, who will be picked at that party?s primary later this month. She would do better in a contest with Nicolas Sarkozy, a frenetic former president, against whom polls suggest she would win 42% of the vote, than she would if she faced Alain Jupp?, a professorial former prime minister, against whom she would win 32%. Indeed, Mr Jupp? has specifically campaigned for left-wing voters disappointed with Fran?ois Hollande?s Socialist presidency to turn out at the Republican primary and vote for him, a more palatable option for them than Ms Le Pen.

All of which assumes, however, that the polls are a reasonable guide to voting intentions. Recent American and British experience now caution against this. The sense of possibility that a victorious Mr Trump offers Ms Le Pen will give her campaign fresh momentum, and perhaps embolden her silent supporters. The more the media and political classes lament the American result, the more she will play on the arrogance and entitlement of the out-of-touch Paris elite. And, whether Mr Jupp? or Mr Sarkozy runs for president, her anti-establishment denunciation of the unchanging cast of political old-timers will ring all too true. A Le Pen victory may still be improbable. But it would be a grave mistake to rule it out.

As much at home writing editorials as being the subject of them, Cam has won awards, including the Canon Media Award for his work on the Len Brown/Bevan Chuang story. When he’s not creating the news, he tends to be in it, with protagonists using the courts, media and social media to deliver financial as well as death threats.

They say that news is something that someone, somewhere, wants kept quiet. Cam Slater doesn’t do quiet and, as a result, he is a polarising, controversial but highly effective journalist who takes no prisoners.